I Am Human is a tech doc with a refreshing focus on people

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our brief breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review comes from the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival.

We’re in a dark moment for the tech industry: a time when some new technologies have been adopted recklessly and backfired terribly, and others have developed far more slowly than their creators hoped. Against the backdrop of this pessimism, a film like I Am Human — a fundamentally optimistic documentary about neuroscience and brain medicine — feels surprisingly refreshing.

I Am Human is a moving trio of narratives about people who are trying to overcome serious physical limitations with cutting-edge brain science. The debut feature from Taryn Southern and Elena…